Sunday, October 25, 2009

Changes

Well: what to do over the winter, thinking of possible events in the Spring?

My long-suffering wife has put up with my training for a half-marathon. That went very well, but do I go for a marathon in April? The training gets long, tedious, and sometimes sore. I get very little done in my free time other than running, and then some weekend chores to prepare for a work week. Do I want to scale back on running in order to get some writing done?

Meanwhile, we've been going to classes to prepare for being foster parents. I don't know if we'll actually do it or not. I'm the more skeptical of the two of us, but even Laura agrees there is a lot to think about when the instructors describe how difficult the kids can be. At one time we had two small children, one of them medically fragile. Do we start the sleepless nights, etc., all over again? Laura says she will do the lion's share of the work as I commute to my job, but obviously I will have to pitch in. Does this make it actually impossible to train for a marathon? Or does writing get pushed even further down the list?

Laura has been baby-sitting, but she needs more to occupy her time.

I've been working a few hours a week at the running store--both to socialize with runners, to keep on learning, and to get a discount on running gear. That part-time job will probably be the first thing to go.

On writing: I finally got back to a long-standing piece on Aristotle's Ethics this weekend. It feels good. I feel a kind of patriotic duty to write something on Pierre Trudeau, and that requires getting through the biography by English which I have made it part way through. I have a piece on gassing the boomers which I may not be able to do anything with.

Having not run for a week, today I joined a group (most of them in a 10K clinic) running about 8K. It felt good. A couple of 6ks during the week, a visit to the sports therapist, and I should have more sense of whether it is realistic, in a narrow sense, to train for a marathon starting in mid-December.